by the admission of men, women, and children indiscriminately as spectators, whereas women were formally excluded from the Olympic ceremony.[105] Such exclusion may have depended in part on the inland situation of Olympia, less easily approachable by females than the island of Delos; but even making allowance for this circumstance, both the one distinction and the other mark the rougher character of the Ætolo-Dorians in Peloponnesus. The Delian festival, which greatly dwindled away during the subjection of the Asiatic and insular Greeks to Persia, was revived afterwards by Athens during the period of her empire, when she was seeking in every way to strengthen her central ascendency in the Ægean. But though it continued to be ostentatiously celebrated under her management, it never regained that commanding sanctity and crowded frequentation which we find attested in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo for its earlier period. [102] Thucyd. i, 26. See the tale in Pausanias (v, 25, 1) of the ancient chorus sent annually from Messênê in Sicily across the strait to Rhegium, to a local festival of the Rhegians,—thirty-five boys with a chorus-master and a flute-player: on one unfortunate occasion, all of them perished in crossing. For the Theôry (or solemn religious deputation) periodically sent by the Athenians to Delos, see Plutarch, Nicias, c. 3; Plato, Phædon, c. 1, p. 58. Compare also Strabo, ix, p. 419, on the general subject. [103] Homer, Iliad, xi, 879, xxiii, 679; Hesiod, Opp. Di. 651. [104] Homer, Hymn. Apoll. 150; Thucyd. iii, 104. [105] Pausan. v, 6, 5; Ælian, N. H. x, 1; Thucyd. iii, 104. When Ephesus, and the festival called Ephesia, had become the great place of Ionic meeting, the presence of women was still continued (Dionys. Hal. A. R. iv, 25).